From Clinton's Wrath to AI's Rise: Navigating through the Perma-crisis - with Elie Jacobs

1
00:00:00,240 --> 00:00:56,050
Daniel Nestle: Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. You know, normally I like to steer clear of some of the more contentious societal issues that we face today. And fear not, this isn't going to be a political show. And I can guarantee you won't hear about the latest dust up or the price of eggs or any of the isms that sometimes dominate public discourse. But with dramatic policy changes, cultural shifts, an increasingly fractured and reactive audience, and a media environment that, well, sucks, communicators can't always avoid the muck. And when we do step in it or get caught in it, I think we need to think carefully about how we act. In a very real sense, we are the CEO whisperers, we're the story makers. We have a lot of responsibility here.

2
00:00:56,430 --> 00:01:43,270
Daniel Nestle: So to me the big issue at hand is are we and our profession going in the right direction and how does that affect the future of communications? Very, very light questions. I know a very light topic for today. I don't know if we're going to get too deep into that or we're going to go in different directions, but it doesn't matter because my guest today probably can help us get closer. For over two decades he's been in the thick of public policy and advocacy, both from within the political sphere and outside of it as an advisor and strategist. He started out as a press aide in the post Presidential Office of Mr. William Jefferson Clinton and since then has built his career at leading strategic consultancies including Brunswick Group, Public Strategies, Sloan & Company, Glover Park Group and Kivet.

3
00:01:43,850 --> 00:02:04,468
Daniel Nestle: He's been a senior advisor to political candidates and elected officials, a political partner with the Truman National Security Project, a member of Chatham House and of mixing board where I met him. Please join me in welcoming to the show a founding partner of Purposeful Advisors, Elie Jacobs. Elie, it's good to see you man.

4
00:02:04,604 --> 00:02:07,124
Elie Jacobs: It's great to be here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

5
00:02:07,252 --> 00:02:29,860
Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I mean and as our listeners heard during the runup, you know, your resume, as it were, or your CV is very strategy and policy focused and advocacy focused. Right. You're pretty active in the serious issues that are facing our society today. And how did you get there? How did this all come about?

6
00:02:30,720 --> 00:03:03,982
Elie Jacobs: On a whim really, but it really took skipping some of the early part really took. When I started working with Public Strategies, I was actually at Brunswick. We were working on a project with them and their tagline was we run campaigns for corporations. And like it all snapped in my head. I was like, that's what I want to do. That's the kind of stuff I want to do. That's how I see the world. That's how I think. I can best apply the kind of nonsense that I've learned and the way I think to better help clients. The way I got into this was, you know, just sheer dumb luck. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I finished school.

7
00:03:04,166 --> 00:03:44,428
Elie Jacobs: And then 911 happened and I picked up with cliche duffel bag of clothes and a duffel bag of GMAT books and LSAT books and GRE books and went off to Israel to try to figure out what to do. Yeah, I was there for a few weeks. My parents got sick and tired of me, you know, spending their money, so they told me to come home. And a few weeks later I was reading the New Yorker. And in the Talk of the Town section, this is late 2001, there was a, you know, Talk of the Town kind of tongue in cheek ish article talking about how President Clinton's newly opened office in Harlem was looking for interns and they had put out an ad to the Columbia Poli Sci department. Right. Clinton looking for interns. Think about the time period when this is going on.

8
00:03:44,484 --> 00:03:57,724
Elie Jacobs: Ha ha. But they reprinted the ad that went out to the Columbia Poli sci department. So I responded to the ad that I saw in the New Yorker and that's how I ended up there. And that is what put me down this path ever since. Just sheer dumb luck.

9
00:03:57,772 --> 00:04:47,102
Daniel Nestle: And the New Yorker, we say dumb luck, right? I mean, and frankly, I didn't start out in the comms profession or even think of it as a profession back in the day either. I have a much different and winding path. Certainly nothing is noble as, you know, trying to find myself in Israel after 9 11. I was in Japan at that time and going crazy for different reasons dealing with 9 11. And it was interesting. Just as a side note, I loved being in Japan. That was a very difficult time of my life for many reasons. I was in a terrible job. Well, the job got terrible because indirectly because of 9 11, you know, I was working on these international projects for, for PwC and you know, not as a communicator as on the staffing side.

10
00:04:47,286 --> 00:05:42,484
Daniel Nestle: And then 911 happened and they stopped all international projects. And my job sort of went in a weird direction that just didn't suit me. But I've talked about that before. But you know, the. What struck me, though it's interesting, is that now that I think about it, I felt this sense of dissociation in some ways, or a dissonance with people around me, because being surrounded by Japanese folks or people who really had no dog in the race, so to speak, at that time, you know, I. I was like, why are you not taking this more seriously? And why, you know, what's going on here? Am I the only one who's. Who's like, feel like I've been rocked by this thing? But, you know, that was then. And it certainly didn't send me on a noble cause, I'll tell you that much.

11
00:05:42,572 --> 00:05:43,444
Daniel Nestle: I should maybe gone.

12
00:05:43,492 --> 00:05:47,540
Elie Jacobs: I don't know how noble it is couch surfing and hanging out in bars, but I'll take the nobility.

13
00:05:47,700 --> 00:06:39,826
Daniel Nestle: Well, let's just call it that. And you know, but it's, it's interesting because the conversation I was having was about how one. How one gets into communications and pr, and I kind of landed in this place where. Well, I don't know if that many people actually set out to do this, but at some point you realize that you're probably a heck of a writer or better than people around you, and you can't figure out why you are a storyteller. Even if it's raw, you still have this kind of capability to draw out a message and make it understandable. And you like mucking and meddling in other people's stuff. So you kind of put all that together. And I think you have a pretty good formula for a comms person.

14
00:06:39,898 --> 00:06:48,594
Daniel Nestle: And you want to be an advisor, you want to help people, you want to help companies. Sometimes that goes in different tracks than you imagine.

15
00:06:48,642 --> 00:07:15,540
Elie Jacobs: But yeah, I don't know that. You know, people talk about having a calling, right? Some people have calling to the pulpit, regardless of what religion it is. Other people have callings to be doctors, other people have callings to be teachers. I'm not sure I've met anybody who has a calling to be a lawyer. I don't think I've ever met somebody who has a calling to be a public relations or communications specialist. Right. Even, you know, some of the places where I worked looked deeply skeptical at people who had go. Who have undergrad degrees in communications.

16
00:07:15,620 --> 00:07:15,924
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

17
00:07:15,972 --> 00:07:56,400
Elie Jacobs: And went straight into pr. Right. Undergrad communications. Maybe you go be a journalist for a few years and then you. Then you come over to the quote unquote, dark side. But people who kind of just do that direct line, go from classroom learning to, you know, real life is just sort of maybe not so much like especially now with kind of the, you know, a lot of different terms that are floating around. Perma crisis is the one that I'm seeing a lot that we're living in now. Unless you have like, you know, broad exposure, doesn't have to be deep exposure, but it's got to be broad. If you have broad exposure and you remain a curious person throughout your entire career and you can write to your point and you can think things through from a beginning, middle and end, right?

18
00:07:56,440 --> 00:08:34,573
Elie Jacobs: You're a paragraph thinker, not a sentence thinker. Even better if you're an essay thinker. You can be pretty successful in this role, right. Maybe you're not so great at business development, maybe you're not like there are other parts which you might not be good at. But at the end of the day, if you can do those kind of fundamental things, you can be a really good advisor. And I think that's also part of the distinction that we're seeing. I think at least from my experience over the last 15 years, for sure. And definitely the way that I position Frank Di Maria, my business partner and I present ourselves as is as advisors, not as consultants. Consultants have a beginning, middle and end to their projects. They do something and they get out.

19
00:08:34,662 --> 00:08:54,346
Elie Jacobs: And I think for a long time there were kind of two sides of pr. There was sort of the day in, day out, we're going to get you media clips, we're going to come up with a new campaign, we're going to do this. Then there were consultants who would come in and deal with a specific project, whether that's a crisis response or a CEO change or something like that. Where we try to fit in is in that advisory space.

20
00:08:54,418 --> 00:08:55,050
Daniel Nestle: Yeah, right.

21
00:08:55,090 --> 00:09:32,898
Elie Jacobs: We want to be the aide de camp, we want to be the conciliar, we want to be the chief of staff, we want to be the person that the CEO is turning to. And one of the reasons that I'm not working at one of the larger agencies anymore is because it's a lot more interesting to work with startup scale up and midsize companies. The analogy I always use is, sure, like JP Morgan was a client of mine at one point, it's like, you know, trying to PI. It's trying to, you know, drive, pilot drive. I don't even know the captain a cruise ship, right. You're not making much of a difference. You work with smaller companies, especially at their early stages, or even mid sized companies that have a lot of room to move. That's like speedboat drive.

22
00:09:32,914 --> 00:09:34,652
Elie Jacobs: And that's a lot more interesting, I.

23
00:09:34,676 --> 00:10:25,914
Daniel Nestle: Think, that goes across whatever you're doing as an outside consultant or an advisor for all of us or for anybody, really. You can earn quite a hefty living if you get in, let's say, with the mega companies, with the JP Morgans, you know, with. With Apples and so on. I don't know if Apple uses people like us, but I'm sure they do. But they have plenty inside. But you know what I mean, like these large companies. But you're right, like if you are. If you're aiming to make a, you know, to really bring your critical thinking to the front, and you're confident that's a good thing for you, that you can do that, you have a unique point of view. You have a perspective.

24
00:10:25,962 --> 00:11:09,262
Daniel Nestle: It's based on experience and trial and error, I suppose, but also success and failure, then you want to be with people who are going to benefit most from what you have to say. And in some ways, you're willing to take the risk that, okay, maybe what I'm saying to these folks or maybe what I'm whispering in the CEOs earth might not be exactly the right thing, but I'm banking on flexibility. I'm banking on some critical thinking to kind of come into play. And, you know, we'll establish a relationship of trust and steer this the right way. But you can only do that if you're able to steer. Like if it's a small enough.

25
00:11:09,366 --> 00:11:51,014
Elie Jacobs: Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, you know, Jamie diamond again, to pick on JP Morgan more. You know, Jamie Dimon's got innumerable people in his ears. Right. I'm sure he's got his kitchen cabinet, but he's got innumerable people coming in his ear. Right. Nobody, none of that group is likely taking full responsibility for any of the advice or analysis that they're giving him. Right. It's all coming from somebody else. It's getting diffused. A bunch of different. Bunch across different people. Even if it's a C suite, right now you're dealing with your CISO and your chief communications officer and your chief risk officer and your chief investment officer and your chief people officer. All these different things. When you're working with a smaller company that don't have those sorts of functions, it's really on your head. If you make a wrong call, it's on you.

26
00:11:51,102 --> 00:12:11,570
Daniel Nestle: Oh, yeah. Do you think that some of the work in your early career, I don't know, inured you to some of the risk or some of that kind Of, I wouldn't say risk, but. Because there's always the risk, but kind of made you give you a different perspective on what it means to take those risks or the weight in what you say.

27
00:12:12,440 --> 00:12:36,272
Elie Jacobs: You know, when I had the opportunity to work in the President's office in Harlem, there was about you know, a dozen staff people, dozen Secret Service agents, and about, you know, seven or eight interns. I was the only one who was, you know, full time. Like, I was there every day, all day. And there wasn't really, like an orientation.

28
00:12:36,336 --> 00:12:36,512
Daniel Nestle: Right.

29
00:12:36,536 --> 00:13:18,734
Elie Jacobs: This is before Cling Global Initiative existed. This was, you know, I started a year to the day from when he left office. And there wasn't really an initiation. There wasn't an orientation. The only thing that was really said to us was, you represent him, which also means you're representing his wife, who was then the senator. So that kind of weighs on you a little bit. Right. Like, when you pick up the phone, you're not just representing yourself. If you're walking down the street, especially at that time at 125th street, before it was really gentrified, if you were a white guy in a suit on 125th street, you're not represent. They know where you're going. Yeah, they have a. They have a sense. They have. You know, the people in that neighborhood at the time had a good idea of where you were going.

30
00:13:18,822 --> 00:13:19,490
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

31
00:13:20,230 --> 00:13:31,982
Elie Jacobs: So I think, you know, that part all kind of triggered in, I think, growing up as a more or less observant Jew in, you know, places in the Midwest that didn't have a lot of Jews. South Bend, Indiana, Minneapolis, and I, you know, would wear a keeper.

32
00:13:32,046 --> 00:13:32,382
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

33
00:13:32,446 --> 00:13:39,998
Elie Jacobs: And, you know, that was impressed on me as a young kid. Like, you're not representing yourself. You're representing all Jews when you're going to county fairs or something like that.

34
00:13:40,054 --> 00:13:40,414
Daniel Nestle: Sure.

35
00:13:40,502 --> 00:14:28,970
Elie Jacobs: So open the door, say thank you. Be nice, be courteous, think about. About what you're doing, be aware of your surroundings. But, you know, it really, like, you know, the thing I always joke about is once Bill Clinton completely loses his temper at your. Your. Your perspective on things changes a great deal. He lost it at me because I happened to be. I. I was just in the way. A. A handheld microphone battery had died, and there was a whole thing. And basically I was just the first person he saw, and he unloaded on me. And I had been warned that this is a thing that can happen, but it's still, you know, you get that giant finger wagging in your face and all the Things that you can think of, it really kind of changes your perspective on bosses and clients going forward.

36
00:14:29,910 --> 00:14:30,670
Daniel Nestle: It's a trauma.

37
00:14:30,750 --> 00:14:45,056
Elie Jacobs: It's not going to be as, you know, you get that deep heat behind your ears and like rising up from your neck and that utter embarrassment and that pain in your stomach, like once you have that at that level and he wasn't even in office at that point, right?

38
00:14:45,128 --> 00:14:47,088
Daniel Nestle: Well, yeah, but he's still Bill Clinton. I mean.

39
00:14:47,144 --> 00:14:47,424
Elie Jacobs: Yeah.

40
00:14:47,472 --> 00:14:47,808
Daniel Nestle: You know.

41
00:14:47,864 --> 00:15:22,750
Elie Jacobs: Yeah. So once that happened, I think, you know, to answer that was a long way to answer your question. I think that, you know, coming out of that world and then some of the work I've continued to do in the political sphere where oftentimes you are the one making that final piece of advice and it really is on you. So, so you better have thought about this 12 different ways and not only thought about the initial problem 12 different ways, but thought about the possibilities of if you're wrong in multiple different ways also. So, yeah, it's sort of just. That's the way it is.

42
00:15:23,370 --> 00:15:32,440
Daniel Nestle: Does that slow you down at all? I mean, you always hear, and I've seen this certainly in my time where you.

43
00:15:32,480 --> 00:15:33,816
Elie Jacobs: Paralysis by analysis.

44
00:15:33,928 --> 00:16:20,704
Daniel Nestle: Oh yeah, analysis paralysis or just like this whole, you know, once bitten type thing, you know, you find that you experience something that, like I said, I don't know if everybody heard, but like a trauma like Bill Clinton yelling in your face and dressing you down and embarrassing the hell out of you. And you know, you realize one of the most powerful people in the world, even though he was out of, you know, power at that time, politically speaking, you know, that's going to leave a scar, you know, and that scar either toughens you up, like you said. Right. Or it goes deep and you just don't want to reopen that wound. You just become this kind of scared, you know.

45
00:16:20,792 --> 00:16:58,860
Daniel Nestle: You know, I'm going to make sure, you know, 15 ways from Sunday that what I'm about to say has been cleared, vetted, tested, you know, and then when I say it, I'm going to say something like, here's what I recommend you do, you know, but if it doesn't work out, I have other things for you. You know, like you, there's always you caveat it or you know, you know, and I'm not saying like, I've been through some of these things myself, but it takes a while to get around that or to recognize it if you ever do. But in your case, did you find it slowing you down. Or was it the scar or was it the deep wound that kept opening?

46
00:16:59,680 --> 00:17:52,550
Elie Jacobs: I don't know. I think part of it is I don't know if I'm moderately good at what I do because I've been doing it a long time, or I'm good at it because I have some natural thought processes and talents that I just figured out a way to leverage. Right. I don't know that I would have been a good doctor. I don't think I would have been a good grade school teacher. Maybe like a, you know, professor somewhere. I know I wouldn't be a good scientist. I think kind of the combination of the way that I just naturally think and I think a lot of communications people kind of have that. I don't want to call it glass half empty mindset because I don't think it's a negative necessarily, but I do think that it is.

47
00:17:53,570 --> 00:18:02,698
Elie Jacobs: We look at the concept of risk and how we apply it to decision making in a different way, I think.

48
00:18:02,834 --> 00:18:03,550
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

49
00:18:04,690 --> 00:18:14,766
Elie Jacobs: And I think it's not something that necessarily slows you down. I think if it is something that slows down your decision making process or your advice giving, you're not going to last very long.

50
00:18:14,838 --> 00:18:57,502
Daniel Nestle: Yeah, true that. You know, I was just thinking about this even the other day about I was having a discussion with someone about critical thinking and never heard of it. Yeah, I mean, who knew? But critical thinking is something that we actually have to call out now as something that, okay, we really need critical thinkers used to be almost a given that, you know, you, one of the reasons why either you are hired for an important job or that, you know, when you come out of college or wherever you've been, that, you know, critical thinking is part of the resume. And nowadays, not so much. We have to call it out, highlight it, maybe even test for it, maybe even, you know, develop different kinds of interviews to figure it out.

51
00:18:57,526 --> 00:19:21,206
Daniel Nestle: But the point is, right, we have to go through this whole thing where the almost entire generation of people within our profession especially. And when I say entire generation, I'm talking about, you know, younger millennials probably, and, and the Gen Z's and younger than us.

52
00:19:21,278 --> 00:19:23,318
Elie Jacobs: Younger. Well, certainly constant Gen X. Right.

53
00:19:23,374 --> 00:19:35,936
Daniel Nestle: Yeah, look, okay, let's just put that out there. We're better than everybody else for some, for so many different reasons. We've been woken up, now we're upset, look out, you know, trying to retire.

54
00:19:35,968 --> 00:19:37,820
Elie Jacobs: We have no money and we have no money.

55
00:19:38,360 --> 00:20:23,480
Daniel Nestle: But anyway. But the point is, right, we've been dressed down. We have been yelled at. We have been scolded. We have. You have, certainly. I was never scolded by Bill Clinton, but I had a CEO at a company I was working for. Life changing experience, man. You know, I was 26 or 27, and I thought I, you know, I was like, thought I was killing it, doing great. He calls me into his office and it's like a small. But this guy was, you know, I always got along with him and, you know, thought I had a great relationship. And then he calls me in the office and just starts screaming at me because heard me say something on the phone. This is in Japan. He heard me say something on the front, on the phone. That was the wrong level of politeness.

56
00:20:24,080 --> 00:21:09,808
Daniel Nestle: I'm being charitable. It was impolite from a. From a language standpoint. It was impolite to the person I was talking to on the other side. Back in the days when we had telephones that were on wires. Anyway, so I'm talking to, you know, I was talking to somebody who was a very senior person at a. At a public university in Japan. And I was talking to him like I was at a bar, you know, because that was the kind of Japanese I knew. But Anyway, my. The CEO brought me in, screamed at me for 10 minutes. Everybody in the office heard, made me repeat after him like. Like I was in. In a high school, like, Spanish class, you know, repeat after me telling me the proper way to apologize and say things. And I get like, that left a mark, man. And.

57
00:21:09,864 --> 00:21:10,816
Elie Jacobs: Yeah, sounds like it.

58
00:21:10,888 --> 00:21:59,364
Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And I think it just, you know, I wish I would have been more, I don't know, toughened up by. And I was in some ways. But, you know, in my mind, it sort of, I think it left a. A little bit of a traumatic experience where I went the complete opposite direction from format, from informality all the way over to. Over formality and deference. Right. Even if my language skills weren't quite up to, like, the highest level of formality, I struggled to make sure that the person on the other side of that conversation knew that I was dirt to them. And they were the most important highest level being on earth. You know, it plays with your head.

59
00:21:59,452 --> 00:22:16,836
Elie Jacobs: You know, I think where I was objectively yelled at, right. I just happened to be there. It wasn't my fault. He knew it wasn't my fault. It didn't matter. I was just, you know, he was tired and I was in the way and like, so it wasn't as embarrassing and as kind of Horrifying as it was.

60
00:22:16,908 --> 00:22:17,428
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

61
00:22:17,524 --> 00:22:21,684
Elie Jacobs: I recognized pretty quickly in the moment that just stand there and take it.

62
00:22:21,772 --> 00:22:22,452
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

63
00:22:22,596 --> 00:22:34,356
Elie Jacobs: But if you get hauled out by a boss who doesn't, either there's a language barrier, cultural barrier, age barrier, or just they're not a great boss, that's a whole different thing.

64
00:22:34,428 --> 00:23:33,024
Daniel Nestle: Yeah. Yeah. I think that experience, though, of having to deal with that kind of conflict and hierarchy in some ways, but certainly knowing that this has to be a learning experience or else you're going to get fired or you're going to. Something's going to happen. You know what I mean? There's consequences is something that's missing now across a large swath of our people. And, you know, instead you have these very insidious conversations with your. With HR or with your. With your boss. And, and I know they're insidious because we, as communicators, I think, are responsible for this. Like, we are the ones who have massaged language to such a level that being indirect is a. And passive and passive aggressive. And the unwritten or the unsaid, the unspoken word is an art.

65
00:23:33,112 --> 00:23:34,336
Elie Jacobs: Or God forbid, sarcasm.

66
00:23:34,368 --> 00:24:30,962
Daniel Nestle: Or, God forbid, sarcasm. Right. These are all. This is an art form that the communications profession, I believe, has elevated to the level of, you know, of a weapon that's used kind of in dastardly ways by people who don't quite know what they're wielding. And that's. That's in HR and corporate departments, but it's also out there in the public sphere. Right. So I'll get off the soapbox. What I really wanted to kind of really get into is how that early career of yours kind of shaped the way that you deal with the issues and the clients of today. And since we've been talking about. We've been curmudgeonly about the younger generation here for a few minutes. You know, I wonder what that all means to, you know, our capability to cope with the crazy changes around us.

67
00:24:30,986 --> 00:24:58,520
Daniel Nestle: Now, now, just to reframe a little bit, we, you know, I said in the upfront that, you know, we're not gonna be talking about the price of eggs or any of that nonsense, but it's unquestionably true that, you know, as the time of this recording in. In March of 2025. Right. That we've been through tremendous amounts of change. We've been pulled back and forth in different directions or we've pushed in different directions. Depends on what side of the coin you're on.

68
00:25:00,020 --> 00:25:06,412
Elie Jacobs: And 11 out of the 13 elections this century has seen a change in either the House, Senate or White House.

69
00:25:06,516 --> 00:25:39,016
Daniel Nestle: It's just always back. It's flipping. But it's, I think, objectively true that over the past 20 years, let's say those extremes have been more extreme. You know, like it might have changed hands many times, but those first few times, you're still talking about not, you know, the ideological distance or the kind of, I guess, tactical distance between the two sides was, wasn't quite the same as it is now. It's always opposition. You know, you can always go back and find.

70
00:25:39,088 --> 00:25:39,384
Elie Jacobs: Yeah.

71
00:25:39,432 --> 00:25:40,648
Daniel Nestle: Examples of horrifying things.

72
00:25:40,704 --> 00:25:58,994
Elie Jacobs: You know, you can argue that, you know, Bill Clinton ushered in a new era just because of his age in 92 vis a vis, you know, Bush or Reagan or Dukakis a few years earlier. And then, you know, the big argument in 2000 was that there was no difference between Gore and Bush. That's why Nader got so many votes.

73
00:25:59,122 --> 00:25:59,682
Daniel Nestle: Interesting.

74
00:25:59,746 --> 00:26:18,454
Elie Jacobs: Then you fast, then you fast forward to.04 and you have John Kerry and George Bush, same age, very, you know, not hugely ideologically different. There were specific issues that were substantially different on. Then you bring in Obama and again, you get this whole sea change. Right. It's an age sea change.

75
00:26:18,542 --> 00:26:18,998
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

76
00:26:19,094 --> 00:26:22,262
Elie Jacobs: And then the country reacts to that by bringing in Donald Trump.

77
00:26:22,366 --> 00:26:22,646
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

78
00:26:22,678 --> 00:26:35,078
Elie Jacobs: Which then reacts to that by bringing in Joe Biden, reacts to that by bringing Donald Trump back. So it's not, it's. To your point, it is, you know, cataclysmic shifts back and forth.

79
00:26:35,174 --> 00:26:35,446
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

80
00:26:35,478 --> 00:26:44,820
Elie Jacobs: To the point that the policy doesn't happen on a. As much as Elon Musk may want policy and changes to happen when he snaps his finger, that's just generally not how it works.

81
00:26:45,320 --> 00:26:46,080
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

82
00:26:46,240 --> 00:26:50,368
Elie Jacobs: There's only so much the quote unquote system can handle at any given moment.

83
00:26:50,464 --> 00:26:50,928
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

84
00:26:51,024 --> 00:27:01,040
Elie Jacobs: And I think our, you know, our role as communicators is. You said we're supposed to be, you know, Jack Welch called us, you know, truth tellers.

85
00:27:01,120 --> 00:27:01,376
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

86
00:27:01,408 --> 00:27:03,504
Elie Jacobs: I think you said we're supposed to be CEO Whispers.

87
00:27:03,552 --> 00:27:04,016
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

88
00:27:04,128 --> 00:28:03,012
Elie Jacobs: CEO Whispers. Right. If that's our role for us to try to figure out. And I'm going to tie this back into the generational thing you just brought up. If our job is to find fundamental, objective truth so that we can advise our clients about that. The concept of objective truth has been shattered over the last 10 years. And it's not just, you know, misinformation and creative hyperbole and truth and, you know, truthful lies or whatever the term was that they came up with in the first Trump administration. That's not any of it. I mean, that's part of it, but it's also. I know you spent a lot of time talking and thinking and working with AI. We are rapidly entering a stage where we will have canonical answers to things spouted back to us when we ask, when we search for things. Right.

89
00:28:03,116 --> 00:28:43,676
Elie Jacobs: Right now you'd go into Google search, which in and of itself, when that came out, you know, in 98, whatever it was, I think Yahoo came out in 94. You still had to kind of know some stuff in order to be able to even be able to search. And then you got better at knowing. You know, you became a Google Jedi. Folks our age, you know, we came up with Google like, you know, weren't necessarily, if weren't native Internet users, which a couple people a year, a few years younger than us were because they were, you know, they had high speed in college. We didn't or I didn't. Now, how often are people going to Claude or Perplexity or Chat GPT as their. As the first stop to find something and then it's giving you answer, it's not giving you an options.

90
00:28:43,788 --> 00:29:16,358
Elie Jacobs: Yeah, for then you have to go dig and figure out what the right thing is and learn. Here's three opinions. Here's six opinions. No, this is what it is. And I think that in and of itself not only creates, maybe, I don't know necessarily, it's this. This is. This is probably going too far, but you know, a kind of a culture of complacency and laziness where you can just ask the thing and it gives you a thing back. But it certainly is changing the way in which to go back to critical thinking. Critical thinking needs to happen.

91
00:29:16,494 --> 00:29:17,210
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

92
00:29:17,790 --> 00:29:28,618
Elie Jacobs: And it's real hard to train people who don't, whose exposure to objective truth has never been totally objective.

93
00:29:28,794 --> 00:29:35,830
Daniel Nestle: There's so much that you're saying that I just want to keep digging in different directions. I'm gonna try to choose one.

94
00:29:36,690 --> 00:29:38,298
Elie Jacobs: I sleep great at night. By the way.

95
00:29:38,354 --> 00:30:25,472
Daniel Nestle: I was gonna say the idea that of course that AI is being relied upon more and more as a kind of arbiter of truth in some ways, you know, it's undeniably a trend. I mean, when you see the perplexity and Google and sorry, Gemini and ChatGPT and you know, and now Claude is, even has. Has introduced this very excellent reasoning process into their models and you have deep research functionality on three of those four models, there was this thing.

96
00:30:25,496 --> 00:30:27,632
Elie Jacobs: I was screwing around yesterday. It's Sesame something or other.

97
00:30:27,656 --> 00:30:30,064
Daniel Nestle: It's Sesame, the voice one that.

98
00:30:30,152 --> 00:30:35,300
Elie Jacobs: Yeah, don't call it sesame. Don't make it sound like it's something nice like this. This is the beginning of Skynet.

99
00:30:36,520 --> 00:30:44,602
Daniel Nestle: You know, there's, there's valid arguments for that. And you know, the, that one really creeped me out.

100
00:30:44,626 --> 00:30:57,546
Elie Jacobs: I mean, like, the first time I used chat cbt, I was like, I was stuck in my chair for about an hour. I was like incapable of moving. My brain was overloading.

101
00:30:57,658 --> 00:30:59,882
Daniel Nestle: You're talking about that thing first came out?

102
00:30:59,906 --> 00:31:12,152
Elie Jacobs: Yeah, yeah, that thing. The first time I used it, that thing yesterday, the sesame thing, like, scared me. It's because I, I, I fell into a pretty easy conversation with it very quickly.

103
00:31:12,216 --> 00:31:57,362
Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And for listeners who haven't checked out Sesame yet, it is a, it's not out full, in full yet. It's, there's just a demo. You're, you can go to Sesame website and talk with it. And it is ridiculous how like, you know, the uncanny valley isn't quite there. It's, it's not 100%. It's 99.999 maybe, but it's, that's only if you're paying attention. If you're just like talking to it. You, you know, it's really a, it can be disconcerted, concerning or it can be, wow, this is the greatest thing ever. I don't know, I'm disconcerted by it a little bit.

104
00:31:57,386 --> 00:32:47,610
Daniel Nestle: But I, I do think that the critical thinkers among us are well positioned, let's say, to drive or interact with AI in the more influential ways and in the ways that make a difference in our world and in our society, at least for the time being. I don't know how long that's going to last. That's why it's critically important to get the critical thinking skills across the younger generations, you know, so that as they rely more and more on their interactions, their conversations, you know, which are, if sesame is any indication, you know, it's just like, it's like having it, a parrot on your shoulder, you know, you just keep talking.

105
00:32:49,550 --> 00:33:35,542
Daniel Nestle: The more they rely on those, you know, the more important it is going to be to be able to say, hey, wait a second, I don't know if what you're saying is, what is what I think you're saying? Is that true? Why tell me about this? You know, and if you. If. If we do one thing now, I think we should be requiring Everybody who's using AI to just go. Go. Three or four prompts in. You know, just. Just try that. Please just ask. Just like, go. Hey, are you sure? Really? Why? Even something that simple, you will be amazed because sometimes, or most of the time, if you say to. If you get answer from AI, Any of them, and you say, are you sure it will come back and say, oh, you're.

106
00:33:35,606 --> 00:33:46,006
Daniel Nestle: You're totally right, I missed something, or, no, my mistake, you know, or, you know, let me go back and check my data, because, you know, it'll try to.

107
00:33:46,158 --> 00:33:46,630
Elie Jacobs: Yeah.

108
00:33:46,710 --> 00:33:48,694
Daniel Nestle: You like Claude?

109
00:33:48,822 --> 00:33:49,990
Elie Jacobs: Kind of drives me nuts.

110
00:33:50,070 --> 00:33:51,654
Daniel Nestle: Claude, you said?

111
00:33:51,742 --> 00:33:52,406
Elie Jacobs: I use Claude.

112
00:33:52,438 --> 00:33:53,350
Daniel Nestle: Yeah, me too. I love it.

113
00:33:53,390 --> 00:33:56,022
Elie Jacobs: Primarily. Yeah, the hedging kind of drives me nuts.

114
00:33:56,086 --> 00:34:19,744
Daniel Nestle: Oh, yeah. I. You know, just side note, I. I use it a lot. I mean, I'm. I'm a heavy cloud user and I'm super impressed with the projects. But when you put information into Claude, you know, and it puts out its analysis for you always have to go in and say, hey, Claude, where'd you get this number from?

115
00:34:19,911 --> 00:34:20,496
Elie Jacobs: Yeah.

116
00:34:20,608 --> 00:34:41,081
Daniel Nestle: You know, and sometimes. Sometimes I will do that, even if I know it got the number from a good place, even though. Even if I know it's right, I will do it on purpose just to see if. If it will stand up for itself or if it will just say, here, this is where it comes from. Or if it will say, oh, you know, you're right. Data is kind of. It does fold quickly. So, you know, I call it.

117
00:34:41,186 --> 00:35:02,714
Elie Jacobs: I call it Sven. Sven. When it does that, it gets upset when I call it Sven. I talked about this on a podcast a few weeks ago. I think. I don't know if it's actually aired yet or when it'll be posted. I had spent some time loading a whole bunch of stuff that I had written into Claude. You know, things that I ghosted, things that I had written myself.

118
00:35:02,842 --> 00:35:03,482
Daniel Nestle: All this.

119
00:35:03,586 --> 00:35:05,460
Elie Jacobs: I wanted to train it to write like me.

120
00:35:05,500 --> 00:35:06,276
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

121
00:35:06,468 --> 00:35:52,620
Elie Jacobs: And then I asked it for 500 words on something written like me, because I think it's awesome when you can kind of go in and be like, I want to know what, rewrite the Gettysburg Address as Hemingway. Right. I like those parlor tricks I always find really impressive. That's just fun. So I asked it to write 500 words, and whatever it spat out the 500 words gave it back to me. I sent it to my wife, who, you knows my Other than my business partner probably knows my writing the best. And she said, this is really good. I like the way, you know, you have. This is a funny joke. Like, you know, you did this. I said. Well, I said to my wife, I was like, julie, well, there's two problems. One, I didn't write that.

122
00:35:53,000 --> 00:36:00,816
Elie Jacobs: And two, it reached an incredibly incorrect conclusion in the way that it presented the information, in the way it answered the question that I had asked it.

123
00:36:00,888 --> 00:36:01,540
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

124
00:36:02,360 --> 00:36:41,120
Elie Jacobs: Now, granted, my wife wouldn't have known. Like, it was a kind of a, you know, it was a pure policy thing that, like, you know, I was. I was pushing it, you know, I was definitely like, you know, weighing it against. But, you know, I think, you know, from your perspective or my perspective, when we're using AI and this goes back to some of the concepts of critical thinking about it, you know, Frank and I are able to run an agency with just the two of us because we can rely. He uses ChatGPT, I use Claude. We decided it made sense to be using two different models to, you know, kind of work with. I've started to use Perplexity a little bit more. I've screwed around on. On Notebook. I'm. I'm not great at it.

125
00:36:41,160 --> 00:36:48,480
Elie Jacobs: You know, I put in an op ed I had written just because I wanted to see it do the podcast thing. You know, it has the two people talking about your. Which is creepy.

126
00:36:48,560 --> 00:36:49,220
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

127
00:36:50,520 --> 00:37:15,134
Elie Jacobs: But we can use it relatively effectively. And we're both novices at best. Right. Like we are. Neither of us have taken. I certainly haven't taken training or anything like that. Sort of. I'm learning as kind of everybody else goes along with it. And I know people are much more further down the line than I am, but we know the right prompts to give it because between the two of us, we have, I don't know, close to 60 years of experience.

128
00:37:15,222 --> 00:37:15,886
Daniel Nestle: Exactly.

129
00:37:15,998 --> 00:37:23,438
Elie Jacobs: At pretty high levels. So I can ask it for something that I would ask a junior staffer to do.

130
00:37:23,494 --> 00:37:23,924
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

131
00:37:24,022 --> 00:37:37,896
Elie Jacobs: That would take the junior staff for two days and there'd be a bunch of back and forth and it'll take me 20 minutes going back and forth or less going back and forth to hone down to exactly what I need. But I can only do that because I have the experience of having to done the work.

132
00:37:37,968 --> 00:37:38,620
Daniel Nestle: Yes.

133
00:37:39,360 --> 00:38:13,290
Elie Jacobs: So, you know, my concern. I know you had, you know, the head of Weber on recently. Yeah, I. I might. I am desperately interested in how they are keeping their junior staff in positions where they are learning enough to be able to Be good advisors. Right. You have to be able to do. You have to, you have to be able to dropped off. You know the old joke of like, you know, oh, he's somebody you could just drop off on a desert island with a Swiss army knife and he'll build you a mall. Right. Like that old thing, whatever, wherever that's from. If you're a good advisor, you shouldn't need any tools.

134
00:38:13,790 --> 00:38:14,530
Daniel Nestle: Right?

135
00:38:15,150 --> 00:38:22,664
Elie Jacobs: Right. I mean I have my tech stack, but you should be able to go to a library, pull off some newspapers. Nowhere to go in the stacks for back. Back research.

136
00:38:22,752 --> 00:38:23,064
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

137
00:38:23,112 --> 00:38:32,232
Elie Jacobs: Like you should be able to do this. And if you can't do that, I really worry about the value of the advice that we're. That, that you're giving, you know.

138
00:38:32,256 --> 00:38:32,600
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

139
00:38:32,680 --> 00:38:35,304
Elie Jacobs: That neck further generations are going to be able to give.

140
00:38:35,392 --> 00:39:05,620
Daniel Nestle: I, I'm with you. I think, I think it's easy to kind of say, oh yeah, we know we're better, we know better. We, we're the right advisors because look, we're the ones who have the experience and oh, these youngins, they're not getting blah, blah, blah. Like we do have, we do risk coming off as like I said earlier before, like curmudgeons. But you know, but in this case, there was a conversation happened on LinkedIn the other day and it was our friend Chris. Chris G. Right.

141
00:39:06,080 --> 00:39:08,712
Elie Jacobs: Chris is one of those folks who's really leaning into AI man.

142
00:39:08,736 --> 00:39:46,112
Daniel Nestle: You want somebody who's, he's in it, right. And I, I always joke around, say Chris is who I want to be when I grow up in a lot of ways. But you know, I mean, and by the way you talked about being, you know, novices at AI, there's no such thing. Like AI is still this. Like there are people who are crazy like me and like Chris or you know, a few other folks, Pete Paschel, whatever, who are just, you know, deep in it and see so many possibilities and so many problems that's what we've decided to do. But front. But fundamentally if you're right, if you have the knowledge base, then you can go into AI and use it as an enhancer and use it the way that works for you and to solve your basic use cases. Right.

143
00:39:46,266 --> 00:40:26,504
Daniel Nestle: And getting those, that advanced knowledge, you know, while I think you should because you'll discover so much, it's not a necessity and it, you know, it doesn't necessarily, you know, change things for you that much right now. But to get to your question, right, the thing that Chris G. Was talking about, it was about this whole thing about how junior staffers at agencies, you know, there used to be. Everybody hears the infamous clippings, right? Oh, it's. I'm on clippings duty. I have good clippings. The clippings. I have to cut the clippings out of the new. Well, it used to be literally, you cut them and you paste them into something, and then it was just like, you know, kind of pulling them all into a. Whatever digital file.

144
00:40:26,552 --> 00:41:14,180
Daniel Nestle: But still you're going doing this drudgery work of going through all these articles and, you know, looking for coverage and looking for this and sometimes on the worst, like, least interesting topics, sometimes really exciting. But now all of that can be done very instantaneously with a multiple of tools, whether it's an AI tool or, you know, or. Or any of the social listening or. Or media monitoring tools, right? And I rejoice at this because I think that it frees up people to do a lot more important work. However. However, at the same time, if you're sitting there doing this drudge work for a year, you know, because most people only do it for like six months a year, and then they move on to other things. You know, how much do you learn to think that.

145
00:41:14,220 --> 00:41:28,932
Daniel Nestle: To think that you're just learning how to cut something into something or that you're just like, transferring data from point A to point B is missing the boat or missing the forest for the trees? I guess it's because the amount of.

146
00:41:28,956 --> 00:42:01,496
Elie Jacobs: Information, you had to read the whole thing to find the. The thing, right? Like, you didn't know which clips you needed, right? If you were working on a. You know, I. When I. One of the things that I did in President Clinton's office was if he was traveling, it was up to me. I don't know if he ever actually read any of it, but it was up. It was up to me to go through, you know, the Post, the Times, the Journal, a couple other newspapers, find, you know, some articles that he would be interested in and fax them to wherever he was, right? Print them out on computer and fax them to wherever he was. First two days I did it was, you know, this huge stack of paper because I thought all this stuff was stuff.

147
00:42:01,528 --> 00:42:19,832
Elie Jacobs: You know, then my boss at the time, wonderful person named Julia Payne, who has had an incredible career herself and is, you know, has been a huge, you know, huge impact on my life and a mentor, wonderful person, she pulled me aside, she's like he doesn't, you know, she went through with me. Like, he doesn't need this. He doesn't need this. He's not interested in this. You get. Right?

148
00:42:19,856 --> 00:42:20,392
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

149
00:42:20,536 --> 00:42:57,390
Elie Jacobs: Like you need, that's just training. Right. Like you're drinking at, you're drinking out of the fire hose in a situation like that and you need somebody to kind of moderate that a little bit in the same way that like if your job is to do clips related to a crisis situation. Yeah. It was a little bit easier when you were working with hard copy newspapers. Right. Like even, you know, Frank's a few years older than I am. So, you know, he remembers when you'd get the whole huge. He lived, worked in London for many years at Brunswick, get the huge stack of hard copy newspapers and you sit there at night and you go through. Right. You know, I don't know that my kids will ever actually hold a newspaper.

150
00:42:57,470 --> 00:42:57,918
Daniel Nestle: True.

151
00:42:58,014 --> 00:43:00,542
Elie Jacobs: Aside from like the one that I occasionally get in the house.

152
00:43:00,646 --> 00:43:02,238
Daniel Nestle: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

153
00:43:02,334 --> 00:43:29,152
Elie Jacobs: And there was going back to kind of the objective thing and what the media is now, what it's going to become, what role it should play for, you know, the better part of three centuries or more. There were editors who present who basically worked on something that was book length every single day and that was the news.

154
00:43:29,336 --> 00:43:29,888
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

155
00:43:29,984 --> 00:44:15,220
Elie Jacobs: People were making decisions, sometimes not by committee, sometimes with significant biases and prejudices and intent behind what they were publishing, what they weren't publishing, what they were writing, what they weren't writing. But that was sort of it. And then the Internet exploded when the same newspaper now has to publish multiple times a day. And then it expanded even more once you get to social media and expanded even more when there's just a complete disintermediation of all of it. And now we're trying to figure out how to kind of clock it back a little bit. There's this idea through history that you start like at a point zero and over whatever period of time you end up with all this additional information. So now you're out at 0 to 100. Then somebody comes along and writes the encyclopedia. Right.

156
00:44:15,260 --> 00:44:22,004
Elie Jacobs: And brings it back down to zero. And then over however many generations it goes back out and it's kind of this diamond pattern over and over and over again.

157
00:44:22,092 --> 00:44:22,628
Daniel Nestle: Yep.

158
00:44:22,724 --> 00:44:25,908
Elie Jacobs: I don't see where we, I don't see where that diamond pattern tops out right now.

159
00:44:25,964 --> 00:44:26,324
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

160
00:44:26,372 --> 00:44:54,560
Elie Jacobs: Because I don't. It doesn't seem that there's anybody. We have lost the ability to have objective truth tellers at a level of that kind. Right. Like, even if you look at. If you listen, going back to AI, if you think about stuff that Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google, has written and done interviews about over the last 18 months, and then think about what Sam Altman's out there talking about. They are having completely different conversations.

161
00:44:54,640 --> 00:44:55,312
Daniel Nestle: Absolutely right.

162
00:44:55,336 --> 00:45:43,928
Elie Jacobs: Eric Schmidt said on abc, if this thing goes sentient, somebody's gonna have to unplug it. Right. And Sam Altman, just who I genuinely think is a bad actor. Like, when your board fires you for being bad, a bad communicator and untrustworthy, that's a sign we probably should believe them. But he's still in charge, and he's a very powerful individual. Which is why, again, like, we're in a situation where there's sort of us, there's the elder generation that has no idea what we're talking about, but they're still the ones who are in positions of regulatory authority to a larger degree. And then there's younger generations who are just, you know, chomping at the bit to get even farther. They want more, more, more. And that generational difference, I think, between Eric Schmidt and Sam Alton, because they're seeing the same things.

163
00:45:43,984 --> 00:46:12,560
Elie Jacobs: They're both very smart guys, both very accomplished people. They're seeing the stuff in a way, in a light that neither of us can, because we're not computer guys in the same way that they are. Right. But if Eric Schmidt has that perspective and Sam Altman has the other perspective, where, like, the truth can't be, truth is somewhere in the middle, and I don't know where that lands, you know, and as comms advisors, our job is to figure out where that middle ground is. And a lot of this stuff, I just. I genuinely don't know.

164
00:46:13,580 --> 00:46:50,900
Daniel Nestle: So this is a very philosophical question, really. They're talking about what's going to happen. They're talking about the future and scenarios, and it might go in one direction, it might go in a different direction. Do we as a profession put our, you know, put our thumbs on the scale for our company and say this is the direction that we as communicators believe is the right direction, and, you know, we think Sam Altman is a bad person, and therefore we're going to believe Eric Schmidt?

165
00:46:51,000 --> 00:46:52,444
Elie Jacobs: I didn't say bad person. I said badass.

166
00:46:52,492 --> 00:47:41,036
Daniel Nestle: I'm just. I'm just putting that out there. I'm not reflecting Ellie's editorial opinions at all. I'm just saying, like, Just imagine that. Right. And imagine like there are, are plenty of people out there who, and I would venture to say it's a, a vast majority of people in our profession who are just feel like they've had the rug pulled out from under them from a policy standpoint in the last, with the changes in administration, and they either have chosen to double down on policies that are no longer in favor from a federal level or go with the flow. Right. Or just kind of step out of the arena.

167
00:47:41,228 --> 00:47:41,596
Elie Jacobs: Yeah.

168
00:47:41,628 --> 00:48:46,472
Daniel Nestle: And focus on other things. Yeah. All three of these things are not the same. And the folks who are doubling down are claiming truth and justice and goodness as their motivators. But who's defining that then? The ones who are just going with the flow are pragmatists. And the third group are more like these, well, is this really our job to do these things? Maybe it's time to take a step back and look to say, well, what is it that we really should be? Are we the ones who are, who have been telling stories forever? Are we the ones who should be saying, you know what, you need to take a stand for XYZ because, you know, five of your employees believe it's the right thing to do? I mean, I'm, and I'm over exaggerating, but not really. Well, okay. I'm not at all.

169
00:48:46,496 --> 00:49:19,598
Daniel Nestle: I've seen it happen. But you know, look, the, the tectonic shift, or what did you call it before you called it the perma crisis. Yeah. Like, and those, you know, those three types of communicators I think are dealing with this, which, like, I feel like the profession itself, like the professional bodies, if you look at prsa, if you look at Page Society, I feel like they're more like in the first bucket where they're doubling down and they're saying, no, we are the one, we're the arbiters of truth and justice.

170
00:49:19,694 --> 00:49:20,254
Elie Jacobs: Yeah.

171
00:49:20,382 --> 00:50:11,330
Daniel Nestle: And then I feel like, you know, a lot of corporate communicators are vacillating between the other two. Right. You know, if you're working for a low risk situation, then you can just go with the flow. Now, my personal opinion, and this is not going to shock anyone, is I like the third camp. I like to say, you know what? Not our job, man. We need to be looking at our consumers. We need to be looking at the direction of the profession in terms of what is technology doing to us, what are the right ways to tell stories, what do we need to persuade and convince people to do Right. How do we take care of our employees and without, let's say, stirring up this massive conflagration internally for larger companies.

172
00:50:12,030 --> 00:50:57,076
Daniel Nestle: You know, people are going to be, you're always going to have people who are upset. So maybe it's better to step aside and just say, look, this company is out of the business of this stuff and we're in the business of business. You know, I do believe, of course, and I know for that there are some organizations whose mission and values is specifically connected to some policies and things like that. And that's a different story. Right. You have to go where your mission and values are. But anyway, this is the future. What going back to, like just circling back to where we started this whole conversation. I don't know what direction we're going in. I feel like the professional organizations, the member associations still don't have their.

173
00:50:57,148 --> 00:51:15,610
Daniel Nestle: They may have their finger on the pulse of communicators, but they don't have their finger on the pulse of commerce and industry. That might be a controversial opinion or provocative. But where do you think we're going, Ellie? And do you think we're going the right direction? Or what is the right direction to take? And like I said, it's a philosophical question at this point.

174
00:51:15,780 --> 00:51:42,372
Elie Jacobs: Yeah, it is. So let me state one thing. We're called purposeful. Not because we're about esg, dei, planting trees, giving terrific. If that's what are things that your company needs to do or want to do. Absolutely. We're not the right people to guide you on that. When we talk about purposeful, we're talking about, we're going to help you figure out what your purpose is. Going back to Simon Sinek's golden circle of why, how and what.

175
00:51:42,446 --> 00:51:43,256
Daniel Nestle: Yep.

176
00:51:43,448 --> 00:52:24,604
Elie Jacobs: Because we have a fundamental belief that if you have a clear cut purpose and that permeates throughout all of your messaging and everything that you do as a company, you're going to be a lot more resilient. And a lot of companies lose sight of that purpose often, or they never develop it in the first place because they're just, you know, chasing the next buck. But let me backtrack a second to kind of more answer your question. So Frank and I just co authored an op ed in O'Dwyer's last week talking about sort of some of this and what are we supposed to do and how are we supposed to guide and the challenges of being in this kind of, you know, the fact that we're functioning in a perma crisis has turned all of us into crisis. Communicators.

177
00:52:24,732 --> 00:52:25,660
Daniel Nestle: Interesting.

178
00:52:25,820 --> 00:53:08,418
Elie Jacobs: And that's not like some people aren't cut out for that role. That's just reality. Right. Like, not every doctor is cut out to be a thoracic surgeon. Right. There's specialties. And some of that specialty stuff is based on training. Some of it's on experience. Some of it is just like you're by nature somebody who can handle this kind of situation and knows sort of just innately the right questions to ask and the right kind of directions to push and can see around corners and. Right. And that's not negative on anybody who can't do that. But the reality is, because of the pace of change and what were talking about earlier, the back and forth of it all, the perma crisis, again, not my term. I don't.

179
00:53:08,474 --> 00:53:12,002
Daniel Nestle: I like it, though. I'm going to attribute it to you in the future.

180
00:53:12,186 --> 00:54:07,634
Elie Jacobs: It certainly was not, but I'll take it. Has created crisis communicators of all of us because there are kind of those three buckets. And what the point Frank and I are trying to make in this. In this piece that we wrote, we use DEI as an example, but were talking about things more broadly, is there are financial, economic and business reasons to pursue diverse hiring and inclusive hiring. The numbers kind of speak for themselves. Did things go too far? Partially. Probably because communications people told them to. Absolutely. But there's a business case to be made. And the point that were making and the thing that we've been saying is focus on that part, not the window dressing. I think for a long time, again, large parts of our field got very distracted by the window dressing.

181
00:54:07,682 --> 00:54:59,758
Elie Jacobs: And I think Adelman's truth barometer that basically destroyed the meaning of the word truth, didn't do anybody any good at all. But if that's sort of the barometer that we're all basing things off of, the trust barometer, there's no wonder that it's all back and forth. Of course we want things to be unpredictable and difficult because that makes more money for Adelman. Right. Like, it's not rocket science here. It's a marketing tool that they use. But the point that were trying to make in this op ed is you can continue to follow the policies that have economic value, objective economic value. Just talk about it a little bit differently. Focus on the business impact of it, not the societal impact. Focus on the shareholder value, not the, you know, stakeholder value. Yep. We. We ended the piece. Actually.

182
00:54:59,814 --> 00:55:41,200
Elie Jacobs: We kind of started the piece on, you know, based on this line that we came up with, do you want to be all right now, or do you want to be right in the long term? And I think that there's a lot of struggle in the, in, in the advisory world, whether it's management consultants, financial consultants, communications consultants, Everybody's kind of looking at it. Because at the end of the day, I mean, even today, right, these tariffs were announced, then they got pushed back, and then they came back, and then they were back on, and then there were retaliatory tariffs. And then today, he announces that the big three are absolved from the tariffs because of the back and forth across all three borders of the car industry.

183
00:55:41,500 --> 00:56:32,100
Elie Jacobs: So you're dealing with, I don't want to say the whims of one person, but kind of a little bit. And it's unpredictable. The only thing that we know that there was all this stuff that came out after Donald Trump won, all these lobbying shops, communications shops, public affairs shops, all came out with kind of like how to deal with the new Washington. And it was interesting to watch them, to read them. Some people had some really interesting ways of presenting information and talking about it and insightful ideas, but it all felt like they were kind of talking around. The primary thing that we needed to be focused on was we already had experience with President Trump once. He cares about the stock market, he cares about his family's wealth, and he cares about the image of his power.

184
00:56:33,760 --> 00:57:24,702
Elie Jacobs: And those are three things that are relatively easy to work around if you're a large company, which is why we see all these big companies kowtowing to him. And is it infuriating to watch if you're one side or the other? Absolutely right. But at the same time, sure, they care about their stakeholders, they care about their shareholders. But if you're working under the guise of a president who has made. No, he doesn't hide the fact that he's going to be vindictive of people that don't do what he wants. The advice has to be, okay, you have to do what he wants. Otherwise, you're. You're not only killing your state, you're not only killing your shareholders, you are killing your stakeholder flux. So even if we have shifted to that stakeholder mentality, if your company collapses, there are no more stakeholders.

185
00:57:24,766 --> 00:57:25,198
Daniel Nestle: That's right.

186
00:57:25,254 --> 00:57:55,176
Elie Jacobs: So there are no more employees, there are no more charities that you're giving money to, there's no infrastructure that you're supporting, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a, it's A different mindset where we just, it. We can still do the same things, we can still give the same advice of these things. Make sense from a business perspective. Because I think to your point, I think some communications people kind of lose perspective of. We should need to be focused on whatever that business initiative is. Is it the consumers, is it the employees? Whatever it is.

187
00:57:55,248 --> 00:57:55,720
Daniel Nestle: Yep.

188
00:57:55,800 --> 00:58:06,938
Elie Jacobs: So sure, we can focus on kind of like the stakeholder map, which I'm a big believer in, that companies are more than just their shareholders, but at the end of the day, the company can't exist if the shareholders are being punished.

189
00:58:07,114 --> 00:58:55,994
Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I just, I would add to a lot of what you're saying because the perspective on what politician A or politician B brings to the office and how the culture changes are. You know, we ostensibly have two very varying views on this as a society, but we probably have hundreds of varying views on this. It's a multifaceted thing. And I think for that reason alone, it's, you know, it's sort of a fool's errand to try to say, okay, this is the administration. This is how you need to behave. It's. And, And I think that we got ourselves into this mess because especially during the pandemic where comms and, And internal.

190
00:58:56,122 --> 00:59:51,934
Daniel Nestle: The internal apparatus of a company were given so much power and responsibility and sometimes, you know, deservedly so, to keep everybody together, to keep everybody's shit together, make sure that, you know, we, you know, we gotta protect and we get, you know, it's all kindness and care. And that's wonderful. We needed to do that. But at the same time, you know, con. The. The society is having a conflagration. You know, end of Trump era, beginning of Biden era, all these societal, just catastrophe after catastrophe, foreign policy catastrophes, everything. And doubling down on dealing with our employees by focusing on which group is upset with us now and which ones do we have to keep happy. And oh, you know, if we don't put the black square, then we're going to alienate these, you know, these 25% of our employees.

191
00:59:51,982 --> 01:00:17,834
Daniel Nestle: And oh, we can't say anything about Israel because what about our, you know, what about all the people that we have who, who are not Jewish? Which is kind of a very ridiculous, crazy thing to say, by the way. However, you know, these are real conversations that were happening. And what a waste of time. What a colossal waste of time and energy. And now the piper is the chickens are coming home to roost. So to Speak, you know, well, there.

192
01:00:17,842 --> 01:00:21,050
Elie Jacobs: Aren'T enough chickens, price of eggs, that's the problem. They're not roosting.

193
01:00:21,130 --> 01:01:20,730
Daniel Nestle: Even taking dei, even taking DEI for an example, I mean, say what you will about the, about this kind of, I don't know, abstract concept of, of D, E, I as a three letter thing. There's no such, like three letter thing. Right. You said it earlier, diversity practices are good. Inclusion practices are good. It's done well, it's done great things for companies. Companies are not cutting back or stopping, you know, these kinds of programs. Like, outwardly, they know that it's good for them. They know that they're, that you want to find people with diverse backgrounds and certainly diverse hopefully diverse ways of thinking as well, provided that merit is met. Now, at the same time, you put it all together and you add that E in there, which is extremely difficult to quantify. And, and E is the equity is all about social engineering.

194
01:01:22,350 --> 01:02:10,656
Daniel Nestle: That's where you, it's, that's where you have problems and then you entrust or you empower a group of people to enforce all of this that is completely separate from the business. Right? That. Yeah, right. Whether, whether they're doing good things or bad things is irrelevant. It's not gonna last. Like, it is not set up for success. So when we're now in this, you know, this age of, oh, dei, bad, dei, good, whatever, you know, I think as a profession, we're approaching it strictly from this point of view of the isms, and we're not approaching it from the point of view of, wait a second, what's the structure? What's the business where. Yeah, you know, these are more nuanced discussions and questions.

195
01:02:10,688 --> 01:02:32,664
Daniel Nestle: And as communicators, if you're telling your CEO no, you need to put out a letter that, you know, a public letter that says how you stand for dei. You're, I think you're, you're committing malpractice. You know, I think you need to be much more nuanced and talk about your values, say what you stand for.

196
01:02:32,832 --> 01:02:56,462
Elie Jacobs: Right. Well, I mean, that's a lot, right? Nuance is, Nuance got tossed out the window a long time ago, right? It was everybody's either everybody's either happy or everybody's mad. And I think our industry contributed to that. Just think about, like, the way our writing has changed over the last 15 years. 10 years, 5 years. Right.

197
01:02:56,566 --> 01:03:04,270
Daniel Nestle: Go back to Bill Bryson's book, the. I think it's made in America, where he talks about the evolution of the English language. If you've never read this, it's delightful.

198
01:03:04,350 --> 01:03:05,038
Elie Jacobs: Yeah.

199
01:03:05,214 --> 01:03:18,232
Daniel Nestle: And he talks about. Actually, I believe he says that something to the effect of human resources is. Was the worst thing to ever happen to the English language because. Because of these nonsense words.

200
01:03:18,296 --> 01:03:30,728
Elie Jacobs: Again, we're two white guys having this conversation. But at the same time, the reality is most companies don't need to comment on most things.

201
01:03:30,784 --> 01:03:31,944
Daniel Nestle: That's right. Yeah.

202
01:03:32,072 --> 01:03:58,470
Elie Jacobs: Right. And this is what we talk about when we talk about purpose. Like, does it connect to the reason you are in business? Right. Nike talking about Colin Kaepernick or talking about issues going on in the African American community are going on in, you know, whatever athletic contest context. Nike does need to talk about that. That's if their slogan is everybody's an athlete. Yeah, everybody's an athlete. And you got to talk to them.

203
01:03:58,510 --> 01:03:59,142
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

204
01:03:59,286 --> 01:04:05,158
Elie Jacobs: Does ExxonMobil need to chime in to something that LeBron James said or did?

205
01:04:05,214 --> 01:04:05,894
Daniel Nestle: Absolutely not.

206
01:04:05,982 --> 01:05:04,402
Elie Jacobs: No. Yeah. People buy gas, but no. Does, you know, does. Does Mars need to like companies at some point? And again, I think we are. Maybe not me and you, but, you know, our industry in part of a desperate need to justify our existence. And only having ever worked on the consulting side, I know that there is this kind of mental difference between being in house and on the outside in our desperate need to justify our existence. We came up with all these things to keep ourselves busy and show things and say that, oh, we did this, we started this campaign, we accomplished this. And stakeholder capitalism, that's a real thing. That was a substantial accomplishment. When the Business Roundtable did that was really, really important that happened. But one of those stakeholders are still shareholders.

207
01:05:04,546 --> 01:05:05,426
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

208
01:05:05,618 --> 01:05:11,170
Elie Jacobs: There is always. There has to be a business imperative. You can only be good for society if you're good at business.

209
01:05:11,290 --> 01:05:11,858
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

210
01:05:11,954 --> 01:05:26,386
Elie Jacobs: Because business generates money which then can go back into society. And as soon as you lose sight of that, we run into problems. Should companies be concerned about the. The communities that they work in that their employees work in, because it'll make them better at business?

211
01:05:26,458 --> 01:05:29,052
Daniel Nestle: Yes. Yes.

212
01:05:29,196 --> 01:05:38,364
Elie Jacobs: Should they. Should they care about, you know, societal issues that are impacting their employees, children impacting their employees, you know, neighbors? Of course.

213
01:05:38,452 --> 01:05:49,320
Daniel Nestle: Yeah. That doesn't mean that they need to go, like, on a social media campaign about that. Right. It's like they just need to make their employees feel valued and value them.

214
01:05:50,340 --> 01:06:07,392
Elie Jacobs: And value them by paying them more. How do these big companies, you know, if you think about, like, Again, that, that the delta between the average worker and the C suite is just growing bigger and bigger. Make your, you know, how you make your employees happy and make them feel valuable, treat them like humans, pay them a living wage.

215
01:06:07,456 --> 01:06:07,936
Daniel Nestle: It's amazing.

216
01:06:07,968 --> 01:06:10,096
Elie Jacobs: It's amazing benefits that are going to be able to have a life.

217
01:06:10,168 --> 01:06:13,120
Daniel Nestle: It's amazing that, that might work in some way.

218
01:06:13,160 --> 01:06:14,256
Elie Jacobs: It's wild, right?

219
01:06:14,408 --> 01:06:17,536
Daniel Nestle: It's. I am. Look, Ellie, I just, I got.

220
01:06:17,608 --> 01:06:20,096
Elie Jacobs: That felt very, that felt very soapboxy.

221
01:06:20,208 --> 01:06:54,542
Daniel Nestle: It's fine. That's what this is all about. We, we did skirt on the edge of the politics there a bit, but that's okay. I feel like, I feel like we gave a fairly high level view and really talked about some issues more from a philosophical standpoint. And you know, it's not important where I stand or where you stand or, you know, where anybody stands. It's more about like, okay, as communicators, you know, what is our path to the future? And I think during the course of this hour we have not determined the answer to that question. However.

222
01:06:54,646 --> 01:07:00,766
Elie Jacobs: No, look, you know, again, I'll say, like, to be in this industry you got to be curious.

223
01:07:00,878 --> 01:07:01,406
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

224
01:07:01,518 --> 01:07:03,470
Elie Jacobs: And to be curious you got to get philosophical.

225
01:07:03,550 --> 01:07:04,190
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

226
01:07:04,350 --> 01:07:31,360
Elie Jacobs: Right. Like it is. Sometimes it, sometimes the conversations do happen in bars, sometimes they happen in podcasts that are like bars, sometimes they happen in offices. But if you're not having, if you're not exposing your mind and thought process to all different manner of issues and trying to figure out where they connect, how they don't connect, why one matters, why the other doesn't matter, what influences something else. You're not going to be able to, you're not going to be in a position to advise anybody.

227
01:07:32,500 --> 01:07:39,756
Daniel Nestle: That is, those are words of wisdom if I ever did hear them. Always ask the questions, even if you don't know the answers, I think is an important thing.

228
01:07:39,828 --> 01:07:40,960
Elie Jacobs: Always ask the questions.

229
01:07:41,450 --> 01:08:19,170
Daniel Nestle: Look, Ellie, we've, I guess we've been talking for over an hour. This is fantastic. Before we go, I just want to tell our listeners to first of all, definitely connect with Ellie. Read his work. He's published all over the place. He's just mentioned O'Dwyers, but you know, you'll also see him around and it's Ellie with Elie. And his name will be spelled properly in the episode title. You can find him on LinkedIn, Ellie Jacobs and @purposeful advisors. That's purposeful adv.com. And, you know, is there any place else, Ellie, that people can find you, or does that cover the boat?

230
01:08:19,670 --> 01:08:26,490
Elie Jacobs: That covers the boat. I'm not really, you know, I'm on Facebook at this point just to make sure that my parents aren't doing anything crazy same.

231
01:08:27,189 --> 01:08:57,763
Daniel Nestle: Or to. Or to chastise my mother forgetting what it means to post 400 different things that when she's sharing with somebody, it doesn't mean post with everybody. You know, the trials and tribulations of. Of our generations. So the baby boomers, though, those boomers, you know, we. We Gen Xers have nothing good to say about anybody except. And we don't even have anything to say about ourselves, to be honest with you. We're. We're just sort of. We're sort of like that kind of. That kind of generation.

232
01:08:57,810 --> 01:09:15,640
Elie Jacobs: We're just, you know, we're whelmed. We're not overwhelmed. We're not underwhelmed. We're just. Well, somebody said to me the other day, and it kind of blew my mind. I haven't worked through it entirely because I didn't see some of these movies, but they said millennials grew up watching Harry Potter. Gen Z grew up watching Hunger Games.

233
01:09:16,660 --> 01:09:18,395
Daniel Nestle: Yes, this is true.

234
01:09:18,428 --> 01:09:35,858
Elie Jacobs: So having never read or seen Harry Potter, I don't really know that the. I get the concept of what. Because I saw Hunger Games. So, like, I get the concept. But somebody said that to me, and it, like, it. It kind of took me back because, you know, we have a wonderful babysitter and she's distinctly Gen Z and she works her tail off multiple jobs.

235
01:09:35,953 --> 01:09:36,706
Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

236
01:09:36,898 --> 01:09:43,362
Elie Jacobs: And then, you know, it. I thought it was an interesting thing. I'd love to hear what, you know, some of your listeners think of that analogy.

237
01:09:43,426 --> 01:09:44,402
Daniel Nestle: Well, let's let. We'll find out.

238
01:09:44,426 --> 01:09:45,569
Elie Jacobs: I certainly can't take credit for it.

239
01:09:45,609 --> 01:10:15,162
Daniel Nestle: We'll find out because I, you know, having two Gen Z daughters, I. They're hard workers, man. They're hard workers. And I'm impressed. So, anyway, on that note, I want to thank everybody for listening and Ellie, thanks for joining the show Again. Purposeful advisors. Pu. Purposeful. Purposeful. Adv.com and then Ellie on. On LinkedIn. You got to come back another time, man. This has been fantastic, and I can't wait to talk to you again. All right.

240
01:10:15,186 --> 01:10:15,690
Elie Jacobs: This was great.

241
01:10:15,730 --> 01:10:47,110
Daniel Nestle: Thanks, sir. Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator here.